All Articles in Internet Law

Enforcing Constitutional Rights Through Computer Code, Steve Young

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Lawmaking and enforcement has advanced since Hammurabi first wrote out his legal code thousands of years ago. Today, the American legal system relies on legislatively-enacted federal, state, county, and municipal legal codes, agency-created regulations, the judge-made common law, and various law enforcement entities. This can be a confusing and complex system of rules and their explanations with varying degrees of enforcement. Blockchain technology is an automatic and efficient alternative to written codes that must be humanly-enforced. There has been limited scholarly interest in the implications of a legal application of blockchain technology to a political system but there have been ...

Mobile Instant Messaging Evidence In Criminal Trials, Youngjin Choi

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Mobile instant messaging, such as text messages, are a pervasive aspect of everyday life. The characteristics of the modern mobile instant messaging application, especially in comparison with other forms of more traditional electronic communication platforms, such as e-mail, text messaging, or computer-based instant messaging program, present a variety of evidentiary issues in trial.

To be relevant, mobile instant messaging evidence must be connected to a genuine issue at trial and not too attenuated from it. Authentication is also very important in determining whether it may be considered a non-hearsay statement. Although often otherwise admissible, mobile instant messaging evidence may still ...

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Smart Baby Monitors: The Modern Nanny Or A Home Invader, Sarah Ensenat

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Smart baby monitors exist to help parents protect and watch over their children. The smart baby monitors act as a second set of eyes when parents cannot be in the same room as their children. Low-tech hackers take advantage of gaps in the security of smart baby monitors. A hacker violates a consumer’s privacy by gaining access to private information, viewing the home and its occupants, and even speaking to children through the monitor.

This comment advocates for stricter security legislation for smart baby monitors. Without new legislation, manufacturers of smart baby monitors do not apply or invest in ...

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

In modern society, cell phones have become a virtual extension of most Americans. Advances in cell phone technology have given rise to the popularity of mobile dating applications (“apps”), which are capable of allowing users to date and meet potential partners without leaving the comfort of their own homes. The convenience and allure of mobile dating apps has led to a staggering increase in the number of crimes orchestrated against other users of the apps. Such crimes often include solicitation, stalking, murder, and human trafficking. Unsuspecting and trusting users fall victim to these crimes due to the false sense of ...

Peeling Back The Student Privacy Pledge, Alexi Pfeffer-Gillett

Duke Law & Technology Review

Education software is a multi-billion dollar industry that is rapidly growing. The federal government has encouraged this growth through a series of initiatives that reward schools for tracking and aggregating student data. Amid this increasingly digitized education landscape, parents and educators have begun to raise concerns about the scope and security of student data collection. Industry players, rather than policymakers, have so far led efforts to protect student data. Central to these efforts is the Student Privacy Pledge, a set of standards that providers of digital education services have voluntarily adopted. By many accounts, the Pledge has been a success ...

The John Marshall Journal of Information Technology & Privacy Law

Social media is about sharing information. If you are a parent, often the tendency is to relate every aspect of your children’s lives. Most of the time, children do not consent to postings about them and will have a permanent digital shadow created by their parents that follows them the rest of their lives. The purpose of this article is to analyze the current status and potential future of children’s online privacy from a comparative legal approach, highlighting recent case law in the United Kingdom, which is trending toward carving out special privacy rights for children. This contrasts ...

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Currently large email service providers, such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are refusing to comply with warrants issued under the Secured Communications Act (“SCA”) because in many instances, the requested information may be stored in servers located abroad. In the dismissed Supreme Court case, In re Warrant to Search a Certain E-Mail Account Controlled & Maintained by Microsoft Corporation, the Supreme Court should have addressed whether an internet service provider must comply with a warrant issued under the SCA when the requested information is stored in a foreign country and whether enforcement of these warrants would be an impermissible extraterritorial application ...

Faculty Publications

Traditionally, litigation has been the norm for resolving disputes. It takes place in a public forum and face-to-face. In a global economy, however, such public and face-to-face dispute resolution is not feasible. This is especially true with cross-border purchases through e-commerce. E-commerce requires more efficient and less litigious remedy systems that allow consumers to obtain remedies on their purchases without the cost and travel associated with traditional face-to-face procedures. This has led to development of online dispute resolution (“ODR”) processes, especially with respect to business-to-consumer contracts. Accordingly, scholarship and policy papers have advanced ODR for the benefit of consumers. What ...

Faculty Publications

A great deal of discussion focuses on how arbitration and similar private dispute resolution harms consumers, and how businesses seek ways to avoid helping consumers. It is often assumed that companies and consumers are on opposing “teams.” In reality, however, consumers and companies enjoy more commonalities than contradictions. Both benefit when deals go well and disputes are resolved quickly and cheaply. The problem is that face-to-face dispute resolution can be costly in terms of time and money. Furthermore, getting lawyers involved may inspire gamesmanship and adversarial antics aimed to protect one’s reputation for staying “strong” and refusing to settle ...

Freedom And Affordances Of The Net, Christoph B. Graber

Washington University Jurisprudence Review

This Article is about the relationship between technology and society in fundamental rights theory. So far, the discussion about law and technology has generally been one-directional within the most relevant branches of the social sciences; scholars of the law have been treating technology as a black box when conducting their analyses or developing their theories. In turn, science and technology studies have considered law and regulation as a closed book, which is unsatisfactory as well. Reductionist and compartmentalized theorizing is particularly problematic when it comes to conceiving a fundamental rights theory that is able to cope with challenges of the ...

Washington University Global Studies Law Review

International threats to national security have resulted in a coordinated response among states to protect their citizens, but in a post-Snowden world, are states also protecting the data integrity of its citizens? Intelligence-sharing agreements’ opacity undermine public trust given the revelations of unchecked government surveillance that emerged in 2013. The Five Eyes agreement, perhaps the most famous and fundamental promise amongst US allies, remains shrouded in mystery despite the public demand for less intrusive and more translucent government surveillance practices. This agreement and those which mirror it evade the few domestic safeguards that serve to ensure democratic surveillance. Taking a ...

Washington University Global Studies Law Review

Genocide denial, increasingly common in the cyber world, is outlawed in several nations globally in an effort to suppress bigotry and harmful historical revisionism. Genocide denial is legal, however, in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Therefore, a legal conflict arises when a defendant facing genocide denial charges in one nation flees to or resides in a non-prosecuting nation: should respect for free speech or diplomacy prevail? Little material has been written on this matter, but with the rise of the internet as an anonymous means of communication, it is likely that this scenario will be increasingly common ...

Shielding Children From Pornography By Incentivizing Private Choice, Karen Hinkley

Washington University Law Review

In March of 2016, Playboy stopped publishing images of naked women in their magazines. According to the company’s chief executive, Scott Flanders, “[the] battle has been fought and won . . . . You’re now one click away from every sex act imaginable for free. And so it’s just passé at this juncture.” In stark contrast to the world of past generations, “[n]ow every teenage boy has an Internet-connected phone . . . . Pornographic magazines, even those as storied as Playboy, have lost their shock value, their commercial value and their cultural relevance.”

One consequence of modern technological advancements is that online pornography ...

Faculty Scholarship

Cybersecurity has become a significant concern in corporate and commercial settings, and for good reason: a threatened or realized cybersecurity breach can materially affect firm value for capital investors. This paper explores whether market arbitrageurs appear systematically to exploit advance knowledge of such vulnerabilities. We make use of a novel data set tracking cybersecurity breach announcements among public companies to study trading patterns in the derivatives market preceding the announcement of a breach. Using a matched sample of unaffected control firms, we find significant trading abnormalities for hacked targets, measured in terms of both open interest and volume. Our results ...